Keyword Density

[IsItUPYet]

When taking into account keyword density, does Google only take into account text in the body content, or does it look at other elements such as the title tag etc?

[annej]

Google looks at it what you put within your title tags and even at your URL. It also looks at what words are used in links to the page both the in links within your site and from outside. Also the PR of the pages linking to you matters. Because of all these factors a page can do well in the search engine results for a phrase that is never in the page text at all.

There is no magic number for word density in the text of the page. On the suggestion from another member I checked the densiy of the top 10 results on a key phrase I was working on. I found these sites ranged from not having the phrase at all to having 30% density.

It makes sense to have the key word or phrase a few times but beyond that key word density doesn't seem to matter that much.

[Essex_boy]

Tend to disagree there. If theres not much competition I.e the other sites arent heavily SEO'd then I find aroun 7 - 10 % density is fine

[Nikke]

7 - 10 % density

I have always wondered how you can possibly write copy text that will actually convince your custumers to stay, and eventually buy something and still repeat the same word(s) over and over again that much.

OK. Theres title text, headlines, alt text, title text, anchor text... But still. You have to squeeze in at least some other words on the page as well...

[Jordo needs a drink]

"I find aroun 7 - 10 % density is fine"

But that's the question, what is the 7-10% density? What does it include, body text, title, description, etc.

[willybfriendly]

I have always wondered how you can possibly write copy text that will actually convince your custumers to stay, and eventually buy something and still repeat the same word(s) over and over again that much.

The issue of keyword density in website copy is an often discussed subject. Keyword density was, at one time, a significant factor in SE alogrithms. Today there are wide ranging opinions about what density of keywords is most beneficial, or if SE's such as Google take density into account at all. One writer has reported seeing keyword density on top 10 sites ranging from 0-30%, while another insists that maintaining a keyword density of 10-13% is an important consideration.

Without taking stop words into account (which has a definite impact on keyword density calculations), these couple of paragraphs have a keyword density as follows:

Keyword – 7.3%
Density – 8.1%
Keyword Density – 5.6%

And it still remains pretty readable, at least in my opinion…

WBF

BTW, if we calculated the densities after removing stop words such as 'the', 'in', etc. the percentages would skyrocket.

[BillyS]

>>And it still remains pretty readable, at least in my opinion…

I completely agree, very readable. However, if one were to write a 500 - 750 word essay on the same topic, this type of density does start to sound repetitive and is bothersome for the reader. You've only got around 80 words in your example.

Still, you point is well taken. Such densities are possible in the short term.

[tedster]

My philosophy on web writing is different. In print you frequently refer back to an earlier part of the article with a pronoun "that" "this" "it" "they" "she" and so on. You assume that the reader has been with you every step of the way.

But on the web, the reader may well be skimming, almost trying to cherry-pick the information from your article. For this reason -- for the reader who is skimming -- I use the actual nouns, names and so on much more often in web writing than I would in print or speech. I repeat these words for the visitor, but it naturally boosts the number of times that a keyword is used on the page. In factthis practice tends to introduce more of those "long-tail" phrases that are being talked up so much these days.

Yes, I agree with BillyS that keyword repetition can be overdone and become awkward. But still, more frequent use of the actual keyword instead of a pronoun reference makes sense for on-screen reading and can be made to feel reasonably natural, even if read aloud.

[willybfriendly]

You've only got around 80 words in your example.

Actually, 142, or almost double your guestimate.

Tedster makes a good point here. Since people don't "read" websites as much as they scan, there is an entirely different style of writing involved. It is not conversational English (I am an English speaker and can only assume the same is true for other languages used on the web).

It is about folks scanning for information, and writing with headings, lists, short sentences and paragraphs, etc. is the norm. Repetitive use of phrases is also perfectly appropriate, even without the goal of keyword stuffing.

The style of writing creates a lot of whitespace. A 500 word essay might well be too long for a single page, depending on layout and such, due to the amount of scrolling it would cause. I have regularly put up articles of less than 300 words, especially if they have associated illustrations or photos that take up screen real estate.

WBF

[HRoth]

If you use the keyword density analyzer, it will count the keywords not just in the text but in the title, keywords, and description. So you have to consider that the keyword is appearing in places that the reader isn't seeing it. That certainly affects the readability of the text the visitor sees in a positive way. I have found that it is hard not to have too much density because of this. Usually I end up mostly taking the name of the widget out of the first paragraph, especially close to its beginning, and I still end up with 7%. I also put it in the main heading but not the subheadings, except for the last one, which I know is often a search phrase in itself ("how to [blank] this widget").

[IsItUPYet]

Are there any tools you would recommend to measure keyword density?

[HRoth]

I have been using this one:

[searchengineworld.com...]

It's free.

[zeus]

Keyword density is not that important on google, the most important is the links to you, thats what count on google said but true. I have seen site with a 100% and 1% be no.1 with millions of results in a competiv area. Other search engines have more weight on density.

[Nikke]

[searchengineworld.com...] is good, but only for English pages. It has an irritating habit of not recognizing the iso-8859-1 charset characters such as å ä ö ü and the likes of them.

They are interpretad as non alphanumerics so that a perfectly good, six-character word like snömos comes out as two short words: sn and mos.

As for keyword density not being important for Google... Dream on! Sure, if you have something like 20k good IBLs with anchored text from old domains, you don't need it. But if you don't have that sort of infrastructure, you better make sure that your page mentions those keywords in all the right places and then a couple of more times too.